Octodad: Dadliest Catch PS4Review

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is very much my kind of game. The central conceit of an octopus masquerading as a human is pure absurdist genius, and a premise worthy of even the most coked-up ‘80s sitcom producer. And as the name suggests, Octodad is married with children, and must maintain the façade of being a regular Joe even at home. It’s a great set-up for genuinely amusing gameplay and a surprisingly sweet story.

Dadliest Catch doesn’t give any context initially, instead dropping us straight into Octodad’s wedding day. It’s a deliberately bizarre place to start, and a good training ground for the controls. Each one of Octodad's tentacle legs is controlled independently; your body flopping about as you lurch drunkenly around, while objects can be picked up with a single, snaking arm. It’s actually quite intuitive, and you’ll have your tux on and attempt a nonchalant walk down the aisle in no time.

Exit Theatre Mode

Unlike other games from a similar lineage, such as QWOP or Surgeon Simulator 2013, Octodad’s humour isn’t derived from an arcane difficulty or overly elaborate controls, but from physical comedy, pure and simple. It’s just innately funny controlling Octodad as he staggers and stumbles. If John Cleese were an invertebrate, his silly walk would look something like this. Dadliest Catch revels in the inherent humour of its concept, littering areas with physics objects to get caught on or to clamber up, or liberally applying that slapstick staple – the banana peel – to its environments.

Octodad is a lovable lead character, too. His every burble is translated to hilarious effect during conversations with his family, or when he’s steeling himself to action, and it’s complemented by great sound work. Think Futurama’s Zoidberg and you’d be on the right track. I burst out laughing when he started burbling a ditty to himself at one point.

One too many glasses of crab juice.

A side effect of the focus on comedy, however, is that Dadliest Catch is just not that hard; Octodad is far happier being the goofy, easy-going friend that makes you laugh than it is trying to be your demanding drill sergeant who delights in testing your will to go on.

That’s fine, of course; I’d prefer to be charmed than frustrated, but it’ll only take a couple of hours to play through the story - even with the new objectives that have been added for PS4 since the initial PC release.

What is here is great, however. There’s plenty of variety in objectives, and no one idea outstays its welcome. You’re whisked from mowing the lawn and making coffee at home to climbing through freezer cabinets and shopping for soda in a supermarket, and on to a terrifying trip to the aquarium, where posters featuring a stern-faced scientist and the text “Our biologists know a fish when they see one” threaten to expose our hero as the cephalopod in disguise that he is.

So meta.

Each level presents its own riffs on the core gameplay. Climbing an obstacle course in the aquarium is a highlight, with ladders, bridges, and zip-lines, but it’s just one location within the complex. Elsewhere, there are mini-games to test your tentacle-eye coordination, ventilation shafts to thread through, and the answer to the age-old question: “Can an octopus posing as a human climb an escalator that’s determined to go down as quickly as possible?”

And the follow-up question: “Can an octopus disguised as a human in a hammerhead shark outfit fool eagle-eyed biologists?”

It’s charming and funny, and the PS4 version builds atop the PC original, tweaking level layouts and adding in new objectives to help flesh out some of the leaner missions towards the end of the game. The flashback sequence Sea Legs, for instance, has been bulked out considerably with six new objectives. None of them feel in any way integral to the level, but that's not the point. Sometimes swabbing the deck aboard a violently rocking ship or doing a jig to prove your sea credentials are their own reward.

The mission Silent But Dadly is perhaps the most altered, with a couple of sequences that play quite differently on PS4 compared to PC. The result is a level with more gameplay - and more chaos - but it's arguable whether the redux is actually superior to the original. Thankfully both versions are good fun.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wish there were crazy side-missions!

It's great to see Young Horses revisiting Dadliest Catch in such a significant way before releasing it on PS4, but I can't help but think the team is still missing the most obvious way to improve the game as a whole. More content is appreciated, but what I'd like to see is different content, such as optional challenges that really ramp up the difficulty and take the gameplay to its logical conclusion. Octodad as a whole isn't meant to be hard, which is why - even with some extra objectives - you can breeze through it so quickly, so why not add in some crazy scenarios that completionists can get stuck into once they've finished the story?

As it stands, there are ties hidden in each level for players to seek out, plus the option to play through the game controlling Octodad cooperatively with up to three friends, which is an inspired inclusion. Those of you that own Move controllers and a PS4 camera can also test out the Move functionality, which is reasonable enough. Moving Octodad's snaking arm about with the Move is certainly a good fit, and this is combined with the standard control scheme of using twin analogue sticks and triggers to walk, so it's not a difficult adjustment. Some challenges are made significantly harder with the Move, but it's fun to play around with nonetheless.

One last thing that's worth noting - Dadliest Catch doesn't always feel hugely optimised for PS4. It runs well for the most part, but I definitely noticed the odd frame rate drops - most noticeably in the aforementioned Sea Legs mission.

The Verdict

Young Horses has done an excellent job taking the diamond in the rough that was the original Octodad student project and turning it into a short but charmingly absurdist physics game. While it doesn’t quite take the extra step that would cement its place as a classic, lovers of physical comedy owe it to themselves to check Dadliest Catch out.